A great effects app comes to the desktop.
I wrote about the use of the iOS app Snapseed here and have had lots of fun with it since on my iPhone 4S. Nik Software has now released a like-featured OS X version, althjough it’s four times the price of the iOS version at $20. Go figure.
Snapseed in the Mac AppStore.
It’s 57mB (twice the size shown above) and downloads in a couple of minutes. As I catalog all my snaps in Lightroom, I went to LR3->Preferences->External Editing and added Snapseed as an export option. Thereafter it’s a simple matter to export a RAW original to a JPG in Snapseed – Snapseed does not support TIFF or PSD files, so exports to it are converted to JPG. Likewise, it can save in JPG only, albeit respecting the full size of the original – meaning 3056 x 4576 for a RAW file from my Panasonic G3.
The timing of the app’s release could hardly have been better as I had just snapped a worker at the Transbay Terminal construction site on Howard Street in San Francisco with a backdrop of massive I-beams and the original needed a little something to confer the industrial feel I wanted. An export to Snapseed saw the original thus:
Original exported into Snapseed.
A few quick tweaks in the ‘Grunge’ panel were followed by a touch of CenterFocus/Vignette/Blur, and with the addition of a Grunge Frame I had what I wanted. Saving the file seemed to place it in the Lightroom directory, judging by the filename, but I could not see it in the Lightroom Grid view, so decided to save it to the Desktop and import it thence to LR3. I suspect I’m doing something wrong and will look into it – with PS CS5, for example, a ‘Save’ places the file right next to the original in the LR3 Grid display.
Here’s the result:
At the Transbay Terminal site, SF. G3, 45-200mm @ 78mm.
The simple user interface, the quality of the many effects and the general speed and ease of use make this a bargain, even at $20, compared to $5 for the iOS version. Sure, you could do all of this in iOS, laboriously exporting and reimporting the picture, but life’s too short for that. This is no substitute for the industrial strength of Photoshop, but try doing all of the above in under one minute in that behemoth of an application. Snapseed is proof that a few carefully selected effects in a well engineered product suffice most of the time.
Here’s another before/after of an image also snapped yesterday.
The original:
The shoe. G3, kit lens @35mm.
After:
After Snapseed.
In this example I used the ‘Tune Image’, ‘Drama’ and ‘Frames’ settings. ‘Tune Image’ includes selective options, though I did not use those here. Snapseed has done a great job of enhancing drama and bringing up detail in the bricks, highlighted by the setting sun.
Update March, 2013:
Sadly Google, which acquired Snapseed along with Nik Software, has discontinued the OS X version. Quite why not keep it available, when the support and development costs are zero, beats me but doubtless Google is Doing Evil, consonant with its missing moral compass:
Recent App Store search for Snapssed for OS X.